Rottcodd @ Rottcodd @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

The only winners in this scenario are governments that want more control over their citizens' digital lives.

And that, as the saying goes, is not a bug. It's a feature.

They got 40 million people in that state and they voting these imbeciles in office, and they continue to do it.

Even in an era in which Republicans have come to be defined by psychological projection and unintentional irony, Tommy Tuberville calling someone else an imbecile stands out.

Of a vividly disturbing person.

As a matter of fact, yes.

I didn't make all that up on the spot. I already had the visual image in mind because that really is how I visualize him.

And I didn't even try to do it. When he first bought Twitter and started trolling professionally, I just found myself visualizing him doing it, and before I knew it, I had this crystal clear image of him sitting in front of a desktop PC on a rickety particle board desk in a dank basement room with white paint over concrete and green shag carpeting, lit only by the glow from a cheap monitor, wearing gross stained sweats and a hoodie, hunched over a grimey keyboard and occasionally giggling to himself.

I keep trying to visualize the more likely reality for a billionaire of some sort of extremely custom multi-monitor setup in the center of a purpose-built room, but it just won't stick.

In his mom's basement, in cum-stained sweatpants, sitting hunched over in front of a cheap oversized monitor hooked up to an underpowered desktop PC with lots of LED, trolling on /b/ and /pol/ and jerking off to pokeporn.

Gotta love the irony of a song that condemns having to "pick a tribe and hate the other side" that still can't manage to refrain from doing exactly that.

If you think about it, Trump is really a sort of simple and easily understood person.

He has no firm foundation for his ego, but since he's been pampered and coddled all his life, it's never faced any significant challenges either. So he's ended up with this grossly overinflated and terribly fragile ego, and it's basically a full-time job just keeping it inflated and protecting it from harm.

It's going to be up to future generations to deliver the full weight of the condemnation those fucking animals deserve, because unfortunately, the positions of power in the West today are held almost exclusively by psychopathic fuckwads and craven cowards who don't have the integrity and/or courage to make a stand.

More than any other time in my life, I find myself wishing right now that Hell is a real place, because the entire IDF, virtually every Israeli politician, a terrifying percentage of Israeli citizens and damned near every western politician of any note deserves nothing more than to burn in it for all eternity. They are each and all unforgivably evil.

I don't have any expertise with which to answer your question definitively, but I wanted to chime in to say that my first thought was exactly this: "hands that are gripped together are unable to present a threat to you, so it is a signal of voluntary vulnerability."

And rather than vulnerability, it might be more accurate to say that it represents submission, which would tie in with your second question, so it's not so much that one is signaling that one is not a threat to the god(s), but that one submits.

And in that context, it's likely noteworthy that the most common example of clasped hands outside of prayer is when one is earnestly begging something of someone else, and especially a favor or a certain inconvenience.

Oh look - bullshit from the NYT.

There are no meaningful "hopes" for a cease-fire, because everyone who's actually involved or even just honestly paying attention knows full well that Israel is never going to agree to one - that their one and only goal from the beginning was and is the annexation of the entirety of Gaza, and they're not going to stop murdering Gazans until they achieve that goal (if they ever atop at all).

This is just shallow propaganda to try to distract from the fact of Israel's malevolence and the complicity of its western allies, and most notably of the US.

Yes.

The goal - and this was already obvious long before the election to anyone with a functioning brain and a speck of intellectual integrity - was and is to destroy the last vestiges of American representative democracy and institute a kleptocratic oligarchy.

Is NBC News actually just now catching on?

They're going to have to get in line.

At every level.

And even just a cursory examination of the history of civilizations would reveal that that's par for the course, and that the US is only really notable for the speed with which it's reached this point.

It means that either the test is flawed, the results are bogus or the report is a lie.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability.

Current AIs have been designed to produce content that (optimally) mimics the products of reason, but they do not in fact reason at all, so they cannot possess measurable intelligence.

Much more to the point, current AIs have been designed to make enormous piles of money for corporations and venture capitalists, and I would pretty much guarantee that that has more to do with this story than anything else.

I really shouldn't like it, since games in which you die repeatedly generally just irritate me, but something about it keeps me coming back. And dying.

Skyrim is the most obvious one - it just seems more appropriate in the winter.

Ditto The Long Dark, though it's notably not festive.

When it's really cold, and especially at night, I sometimes get an urge to play Little Inferno - it's sort of like one of those old fireplace videos, except with added surrealism and silliness.

The DNC and the rest of the Dem establishment would rather lose than adopt any meaningful progressivism or allow for a progressive candidate.

Their primary motivation, and quite possibly their only motivation, is collecting as much soft money as possible.

And that interest is actually well served by losing, and in fact, that appears to be their preference. If they lose, then they don't need to run in the next election on any platform other than stopping the Republicans from causing even more harm, which saves them having to promise their supporters things that they'll then have to arrange to somehow fail to deliver even if they have a majority. It's easier just to lose, then to run merely on being "not Republicans."

And the one thing that would upset that gravy train is ending up with an actual progressive in a powerful position. A progressive would not only promise things the establishment democrats would prefer to not even mention, but would mean it. And even worse yet, they'd then try to actually deliver on their promises. And that would alienate the big money, which pays for policies that favor themselves, and most assuredly NOT policies that favor the common people.

So yes - if the Democrats want to win, they self-evidently need to appeal to progressives. But that's been the case since 2016, and it's made zero difference and it's going to continue to make zero difference, because they'd rather lose than adopt any meaningful progressivism.

We're really speedrunning this whole autocracy thing, aren't we?

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater." - Frank Zappa

One would think they'd at least wait until the planned concentration camps are built.

This isn't analysis - it's craven blame-shifting.

Trump already has a blank check to issue pardons and already intends to abuse the power in ways never before seen, and it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference what Biden or anyone else does or doesn't do.